 Tonight, Americans already slammed by soaring prices, now getting hit even harder, new numbers showing inflation surging to its fastest pace in nearly 40 years. The Consumer Price Index, or CPI, tracks the cost of everyday items. It's jacked up a whopping 6.8% in the last year, the biggest increase in almost 40 years. Gas is up 51%, beef is up 20%, and furniture by 11%. I think probably in June it was about $1 worth of dollar, so now that dollar is worth about $0.70. This has made the nightly news sound a little too much like a rerun of that 70's show, a sitcom set in a decade, famous for ever rising prices and useless whip inflation now buttons that Gerald Ford tried to stick on everybody from running mate Bob Dole to former Beatle George Harrison. Back in the 1970's, President Ford was better known for literally and figuratively stumbling than for his economic acumen, especially when it came to inflation, which soared into double digits shortly after he took office. Ford believed that the way to beat inflation was to browbeat companies into keeping prices down and Americans into becoming bargain hunters. He declared a war on high prices, referring to inflation as domestic enemy number one. I pledge to my fellow citizens that I will buy when possible only those products and services priced at or below present levels, promised Ford. Joe Biden is looking reminiscent of the 38th president and not simply because he also has trouble with airplane steps. Biden, his advisors and champions of the press are ignoring the tough lessons of the past by downplaying inflation or bizarrely claiming it only freaks out rich people. Then there's leading Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who seemed to be channeling Gerald Ford when she tweeted out that the reason your Thanksgiving groceries cost more this year was because greedy corporations are charging Americans extra just to keep their stock prices high. Even worse, Biden and crew are delusionally pronouncing that we contain inflation by pumping massive amounts of money into the economy. A course of action that will almost certainly make everything more expensive. What Ford, Biden, Warren and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have in common is a failure to understand inflation's most important underlying cause, which the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman was explaining with unique clarity back in the 1970s. To our understanding the cause of inflation is to recognize that it is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. We've seen massive increases in government spending over the past two years, which have been paid for by printing money and historic increases in the money supply. And when you print money, it means that there are more dollars chasing the same amounts of goods and services, which causes prices to rise. In just the past two fiscal years, federal spending has swollen to nearly $7 trillion a year, up from about $4.5 trillion in 2019. That money has to be paid for eventually by the American people one way or another. Traditionally that means higher taxes, cuts in services and inflation, or a combination of the threat. The real tax on the American people is what government spends. And politicians generally prefer printing money to raising taxes or cutting services. Inflation is a tax which is imposed without representation and which nobody has to vote for. And of course it's a marvelous tax from the point of view of a congressman trying to meet the demands of his constituent for more spending. Politicians and government economists will even claim that the way to drive down inflation is by handing out more goodies. What this package will do is lower some of the most important costs, what they pay for health care, for childcare, and it's anti-inflationary in that sense as well. When the president and his advisors touted the passage of his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and promised that even more was on the way through the Build Back Better Bill and other legislation, they insisted that spending more money will somehow make everything more affordable by increasing long-term economic capacity. According to the economic experts, this bill is going to ease inflationary pressures lowering the cost of working families. 17, excuse me, yes, 17 Nobel laureates in economics wrote a letter to me saying this is going to affect bringing inflation down, not up. That's precisely backward because the government will be printing even more money to pay for Biden's bill. As the government borrows more money to pay for its spending and the Fed prints money to buy that debt, the central bank's balance sheet has more than doubled between March 2020 to November 2021. The result is that the supply of dollars has increased by nearly 40 percent over the past two years, which is an off-the-charts record. But there's no reason to believe that Joe Biden or anyone else in Washington is committed to the type of fiscal and monetary discipline that would actually tame inflation. In fact, his infrastructure bill jacks the very entitlement spending that is the major driver of long-term spending. Not only is he trying to expand access to and coverage offered by existing programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, he's pushing for tax credits for parents and new entitlements for childcare and universal preschool. Another thing that's changed over the past 40 years is that the publicly-held debt has more than quintupled as a share of GDP. In 2022, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that interest payments on the debt will be 5.7 percent of total spending and then it will more than double to 11.6 percent by 2031. And that's assuming interest rates stay low. Squeezing inflation out of the economy by hiking interest rates is never a popular political stance. Since it will absolutely devastate the government's balance sheet, it'll be even harder this time. Inflation is just like alcoholism. In both cases, when you start drinking or when you start printing too much money, the good effects come first, the bad effects only come later. And get this, even the price of booze is going up, so not only will we have more sorrows, it's going to cost us more to drown them.